@alex_rdz14: The Spindle went up in 1989 in the parking lot of Berwyn's Cermak Plaza Shopping Center, a genuinely absurd piece of public art built out of eight real cars skewered straight through on a 50 foot steel spike. Shopping center owner David Bermant commissioned California artist Dustin Shuler to create it, and Bermant was so committed to the bit that he donated his own BMW to be impaled second from the top. The whole thing cost 75,000 dollars to build, which sounds steep until you consider what it ended up meaning to the neighborhood around it. Berwyn's connection to cars ran deeper than just that sculpture, too. Cermak Road through Berwyn was part of old Route 66, and Ogden Avenue earned the nickname Automobile Row for the dealerships, garages, and gas stations that lined it for decades. A giant pile of impaled vehicles sitting in a strip mall parking lot in a town built partly around car culture somehow made a strange kind of sense once you knew that history. The Spindle got its biggest boost from an unexpected source in 1992, when it appeared as the car kabob in Wayne's World, instantly turning a weird local landmark into something recognized well beyond Chicagoland. It showed up on postcards, maps, and tourism brochures, and in 2007 roughly 2,000 Critical Mass bike riders showed up specifically to rally around it when its future looked uncertain. Not everyone loved it, though. Plenty of Berwyn residents considered it an eyesore from the start, and the town actually voted in 1990, just a year after it went up, to have it removed. It survived that vote by nearly two decades anyway, outlasting plenty of critics before Cermak Plaza finally decided it needed the space for a new Walgreens. After an eBay auction in 2008 drew zero bids, despite an asking price of 50,000 dollars plus 100,000 in shipping, the Spindle was torn down on May 2, 2008, ending its run for good. Shuler himself died of cancer later that same year. Berwyn never fully let it go, though. Local artist Pete Gamen built a 23 foot Mini-Spindle in 2022 using sealed fiberglass go karts instead of real cars, specifically designed to avoid the rust and pigeon damage that wore down the original. City officials, the same ones who quietly let the real Spindle get bulldozed for a pharmacy, are now planning to promote the mini version as a Route 66 attraction for the highway's 2026 centennial, proof that Berwyn eventually decided its strangest landmark was worth keeping around in some form after all. #berwyn #chicago #pyfツ

AlEx Rodriguez

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Wednesday 07 October 2026 00:15:33 GMT